Mark D. Jacobsen recently retired from a two-decade air force career and is currently designing autonomous rescue drones for a tech startup, which supports and competes with his writing. His short fiction has appeared in Derelict and War Stories, and he is the author of a memoir called Eating Glass. Mark maintains a presence online at www.markdjacobsen.com. His third story for Asimov’s follows a software archaeologist to a mysterious world where researchers seek to understand the sudden extinction of an alien species. The civilization’s downfall raises troubling religious questions, and those questions give the world its name. Of course they